Event report by Ellen Lebelle, Secretary, STC France Chapter

Date and Time: March 19, 2005, 9:30am. - 4:30pm.
Location: Salle Patio 3 (located between towers 24 and 34) - Université de Jussieu (Paris VII) - Paris 5ème arrondissement, Metro Jussieu (line 7)
Speakers:
Stuart Culshaw (VP, STC France Chapter): Automating Web-based Communities - The Technology Behind the STC France Website
Jens Ehrke (Ehrke & Partner): Web-based Product Simulation for Marketing, Feature Awareness and Education: Meeting Modern Customer Support Needs for Consumer Electronics.

Attendees: too few, in everyone’s opinion.

Agenda:

9:30 – Registration and introductions, chapter news
Everyone introduced him or herself quickly and the meeting got underway on time.

10:00 – Automating Web-based Communities: The Technology Behind the STC France Website, by Stuart Culshaw, freelance documentation and website developer

Stuart gave a very complete presentation of exactly what is meant by Open-source software, to begin with. What does “free” mean? (It’s the “free speech” meaning, not the “free beer” for anyone still wondering.) What is a copyleft? (An obligation to maintain free use, as opposed to a copyright, which restricts any use of material). How does the open source world operate in terms of maintenance, support and improvements, for example? (Through blogs, e-mail and community. There is more elaborate support for open-source software that is purchased, though.)

Then he went into the comparative investigation for finding the software behind our STC France website. He not only shared the comparison of available software, but he also gave us checklist for aiding our own search. What is right for us may not exactly fill the needs for every project. He settled on Mambo and the vast supply of modules that provide advanced features such as events management and registration, latest news, discussion groups, newsletters, document management, and more. This means that he can try a module, and if it doesn’t fit the bill, he can replace it with another. The blogs and other users’ messages also help guide the selection. (An aside, post-meeting: our sister company decided to put an ad on the site for a technical writer. We had some difficulty in the Word-to-Mambo copy and paste sequence. We submitted the ad and alerted Stu to the problem. He immediately replaced the html editor module.)

We took a look at the site – front-end. Of course, most of us are now familiar with the site, but this allowed us to see the differentiation between users. We do not share equal access to the site. Guests have the least access – view only and not everything. Registered members get greater access, including the new job bank. Board members have even more with author rights. We can do polls – there is now a poll about when to hold meetings, so we can have more attendees. We have a chat function for when 2 or more of us are visiting the site at the same time. This got us impatient to how he put it together.

We took a look at the back-end. And here we could see the architecture of the site and how the modules fit in and were given the STC France finish.

This presentation took a bit longer than expected because it was interesting and prompted constant questions for more detail.
Lunch – Not at the Arbre a Cannelle – we ended up across the street and had a very good lunch, little less than the announced 20€.

Not at the Arbre a Cannelle – we ended up across the street and had a very good lunch, little less than the announced 20€.
2:30 P.M. – Web-based Product Simulation for Marketing, Feature Awareness and Education: Meeting Modern Customer Support Needs for Consumer Electronics, by Jens Ehrke of Ehrke & Partner

Best of Show and Award for Excellence in Technical Communications in Amsterdam at the Trans-European Technical Communications Awards for work on the Olympus' flagship E-1 camera tutorial. Go to http://www.ehrke-partner.com/ and click on the Olympus E-1 link.

Jens described the process of his help – trying to fit the cerebral user, who needs to understand before he touches the device (the reader), and the hands-on user, who doesn’t usually bother with reading and starts playing with the device and might miss out on a lot of extra features. The only way for you to see this is to go to the site and start – if you are reading, you need to go to the camera and click you way through the procedure. If you are playing with the camera, the relevant text pops up to suit what you are doing. All along, there are tooltips, prompts and questions to guide you back and forth between the text and the device. Jens does this type of tutorial for telephones and other electronic devices, too.

We then took a look at the back-end. The whole tutorial is a javascript application. There is an extensive graphics repository to handle all the action of the camera. But once the application is written for one device of a type, single-sourcing methods make it easily adaptable for the next device of the same type.

This also took a bit longer than expected – due to great interest and questions.

4:15 P.M. – STC Transformation: What’s in it for us? by Ellen Lebelle

An effort to understand the implications on exactly what we are voting on (Referendum to change the by-laws) and how the rest of the transformation will affect us, here, in France.

It was basically a summary of the http://www.stc.org/transformation/ site. A wake-up call, as it were, and it did lead to a number of questions about what this transformation is. As we are in the election period now, please visit the site.

The major outcome of the short discussion is that perhaps the France chapter needs to re-define its charter. We hope the next meeting will be able to devote more time to this issue.

5:15 P.M. End of Meeting